Perrot, Mother's Bliss 2018

Cristiano Tassinari painted ‘Perrot, Mother’s Bliss’ with what looks like oil on canvas. I’m drawn to the push and pull between representation and abstraction. The colours are muted, and the brushwork is loose, like the painting is about to dissolve. It’s interesting how the artist has depicted the bird with a kind of hazy realism, while the background feels like a field of layered, scraped away marks. Look at how the surface is built up – thick in some places, thin in others, revealing glimpses of what lies beneath. There's this juicy black mark at the bottom, kind of smeared, like a shadow, anchoring the bird to its perch. It’s raw, like a stain, in contrast to the delicate rendering of the bird's feathers. Tassinari is playing with different modes of painting. It reminds me a little of Marlene Dumas’s haunting figurative paintings. It’s less about a perfect picture and more about the messy, unresolved process of seeing and feeling.